“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: Build He Won’t
Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist, is a white supremacist and purveyor of fake news. But the other day, in an interview with, um, The Hollywood Reporter, he sounded for a minute like a progressive economist. “I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan,” he declared. “With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything.”
So is public investment an area in which progressives and the incoming Trump administration can find common ground? Some people, including Bernie Sanders, seem to think so.
But remember that we’re dealing with a president-elect whose business career is one long trail of broken promises and outright scams — someone who just paid $25 million to settle fraud charges against his “university.” Given that history, you always have to ask whether he’s offering something real or simply engaged in another con job. In fact, you should probably assume that it’s a scam until proven otherwise.
And we already know enough about his infrastructure plan to suggest, strongly, that it’s basically fraudulent, that it would enrich a few well-connected people at taxpayers’ expense while doing very little to cure our investment shortfall. Progressives should not associate themselves with this exercise in crony capitalism.
Charles M. Blow: Trump: Making America White Again
This may well be the beginning of the end: the early moments of a historical pivot point, when the slide of the republic into something untoward and unrecognizable still feels like a small collection of poor judgments and reversible decisions, rather than the forward edge of an enormous menace inching its way forward and grinding up that which we held dear and foolishly thought, as lovers do, would ever endure.
So many of President-elect Donald Trump’s decisions herald a tomorrow that is bleak for anyone who held hope that he could be a different, better man than the one who campaigned (I was not among that cohort), or those who simply assumed that the gravity of the office he is to assume would ground him.
Hard-line Trumpism isn’t softening; it’s being cemented.
Increasingly, as he picks his cabinet from among his fawning loyalists, it is becoming clear that by “Make America Great Again,” he actually meant some version of “Make America a White, Racist, Misogynistic Patriarchy Again.” It would be hard to send a clearer message to women and minorities that this administration will be hostile to their interests than the cabinet he is assembling.
Bakari T. Sellers: Jeff Sessions as attorney general: a terrifying prospect for black Americans
One of the more famous tag lines from President-elect Trump on the campaign trail was: “To my African-Americans: what do you have to lose?” If Alabama senator Jeff Sessions becomes the next attorney general of the United States, the answer is: everything.
There is no doubt that Steve Bannon – the executive chairman of the far-right website Breitbart News and newly minted senior adviser to the president-elect – has no place in the White House. Nor does Lt Michael Flynn, an Islamophobe with ties to Vladimir Putin who is Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as national security adviser. And yet, the most troubling appointment thus far has to be Alabama senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions to serve as attorney general.
Sessions’ record on race first came to light during his confirmation for a federal judgeship in 1986. A prosecutor testified before Congress that Sessions had said he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot”. Sessions said he had been joking, but his judgeship was rejected. Many alarming allegations were made during the hearings, but the most disturbing involved the “Marion three”.
Trevor Potter: How President Trump could use the White House to enrich himself and his family
For the past 40 years, every president has placed his personal investments and assets in a blind trust while in the White House, or has sold everything and held cash equivalents. President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear that he does not plan to set up such a trust, which would require that his company be run by an outsider who has had no previous business relationship with Trump, and that there be virtually no communication between the outside trustee and Trump or his family during his administration.
Trump is not required by law to create a blind trust or otherwise divest himself of all business holdings, though many people who will work for him in the government will have to do so: The 1978 Ethics in Government Act exempts the president and vice president from its conflict of interest provisions, out of constitutional concerns about separation of powers.
So Trump says he plans to continue to personally own the Trump Organization, a multibillion-dollar company with business interests around the world, but three of his adult children will operate the firm while he’s in office. This is a colossal mistake. It will produce conflicts of interest of an unprecedented magnitude and create the appearance that he and his family are using his office to enrich themselves, even if they don’t take advantage of the many opportunities to do so. These conflicts will haunt Trump’s presidency unless he changes course.
Daniel Denvir: Obama created a deportation machine. Soon it will be Trump’s
Among the many asphyxiating gut punches delivered by Donald Trump’s election, his denigration of immigrants and pledge to deport them en masse stand out. Trump has now signaled that he will move to deport as many as three million immigrants after he takes office, and roll back Barack Obama’s executive action protecting more than 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.
The guesswork under way over the damage Trump might wreak, from decimating what remains of the social safety net to trashing precarious efforts to curb global warming, is chilling. The promised attack on immigrants suggests we will see communities terrorized by what can only be fairly described as a police state.
What’s received little attention is that Trump would probably use tools developed by the Bush and Obama administrations to orchestrate mass deportations. Over the last 16 years, the federal government has used local police and jails as a key tool to orchestrate mass deportations – and that’s precisely what Trump plans to do on a more frightening scale than ever.
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